China has declared a “major and decisive victory” in its handling of the coronavirus outbreak that swept the country in recent months following an abrupt relaxation of its “zero-Covid” policy late last year.
The ruling Communist Party’s top decision-making body made the assessment during a closed-door meeting on Thursday presided over by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in the latest signal the country is seeking to minimize the political fallout from zero-Covid.
In its Thursday meeting, the Politburo Standing Committee said the highly populous nation had “created a miracle in human history” as it had “successfully pulled through a pandemic,” according to a summary published by state-run news agency Xinhua. “There are still many questions about the death toll in China due to Covid – it might be useful if they could release more information, particularly about the all-cause deaths compared to the pre-Covid years,” said virologist Jin Dongyan, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Biomedical Sciences, pointing to one method for assessing a more complete picture of fatalities in the country.
Chinese health authorities stopped releasing figures for so-called asymptomatic cases nationwide late last year, as they dismantled the countries’ extensive Covid-19 mass testing apparatus and allowed people to test and recover at home. Providing a more complete picture of the outbreak – and the death toll – may not suit the government’s interests of reassuring the public about their handling of the virus, according to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
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